By Alexandre Vidal - Demilitarize McGill

In every university in Montreal, a significant amount of academic research is directly related to military activities, and most of it is being done without the knowledge of students or the public. During the Vietnam war, some universities had close links with the American Department of Defense, and received funding for the development of various murderous weapons. Though this war is long over, the military research has never ended.

In recent years there have been several academic research projects, funded by both Canadian and American military interests, that have contributed to wars that are responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of Afghan and Iraqi civilians. For example, at McGill, a division of the faculty of engineering, the Shockwave Physics Group, has been doing research projects in conjunction with the US military that contribute to the development of thermobaric explosives designed to bomb caves in Afghanistan.

Furthermore, the Canadian Forces are financing political science and history professors at UQAM, UdeM, Concordia and McGill through REGIS (the Research Group in International Security) and CEPES (Centre d'études des politiques étrangères et de sécurité), and encouraging them to use their expertise to offer commentary to government and the media whenever military issues are being discussed. It is unclear how this money comes with strings attached, and how it's possible for professors to remain neutral in such a situation. How, for example, can research supporting the war in Afghanistan be credible when it is being directly subsidized by the same military that is conducting the war?

Members of this research group are encouraged to regularly give their opinions to the media. In other words, the army pays professors to produce military propaganda and disseminate it publicly. These researchers, presented as "independent," are then used by our government to justify the increasing militarization of our society: cutting funding to social services and education to significantly increase the military budget, buying more weaponry, sending more young people to fight (and either kill or be killed) in Afghanistan, and getting Canada even more deeply involved in criminal wars.

This dire situation can and must be changed. At the moment, a large campaign is taking place to ban military activities from our campuses. To find out more about the academic contribution to deadly wars and what you can do about it, contact Operation Objection: www.AntiRecrutement.Info, or Demilitarize McGill at www.demilitarizemcgill.wordpress.com